


Terms of Engagement

by timetobegin



Category: Nothing Much to Do
Genre: F/M, Fluff, bean - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 17:04:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2199909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timetobegin/pseuds/timetobegin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"“Sorry it took me so long to get here. I felt the need to clear your house of assholes.”</p>
<p>Considering she hadn’t expected anyone to come, much less Benedick, he’s apologizing for basically nothing.</p>
<p>Did he just say ‘assholes’?"</p>
<p>In which Bea is angry, Ben is supportive, and they have more physical contact than in the last four years combined... and maybe the terms of engagement have changed. My version of Kill Claudio/post-party shenanigans. Hopefully to be canonballed soon, because that means we've gotten an update.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Terms of Engagement

**Author's Note:**

> Another fic! Bea/Ben is my OTP of the moment, so a lot of brain power spent on them. Might as well write some of it down. If it helps you make it through the silence, I have done a good thing. Enjoy! As always, constructive criticism and comments make my day.

“Bea?”

 

She lifts her gaze from the linoleum floor, in whose direction she’d been spacing for a while now. Better not to think any particular thoughts.

 

“I brought biscuits.” He holds up a plastic bag, stuffed with cookies hardly anyone touched. He’s still in his party clothes, damn him, bringing all the thoughts she’s desperately trying not to think back into her brain. She doesn’t even have it in her to mock how very British he is. She tries just to focus on him, instead of when they last saw one another, because even something as weird as looking at him without hate is better than the chaos of a couple hours ago.

 

Somehow the harsh lighting doesn’t look terrible on him. His clothes don’t look terrible on him, either. It’s been a while since she’s seen him in anything but a t-shirt and shorts. Finally, she lifts her chin off her knees and brings her eyes to his face, and he just looks sad as he drops onto the bench next to her.

 

He offers her the bag. She opens it and grabs one. The cookie dough was better, but it tastes delicious. And chocolate. Dark chocolate. (Later she’ll wonder if Ben had remembered her preference or if it had been random, but that matters, like, a negative percent right now.) Food helps. Chewing helps keep her mouth from turning too far down.

 

“Sorry it took me so long to get here. I felt the need to clear your house of assholes.”

 

Considering she hadn’t expected anyone to come, much less _Benedick,_ he’s apologizing for basically nothing.

 

_Did he just say ‘assholes’?_

 

“How is she?”

 

The question is like getting punched in the chest and she forgets any other train of thought. “She’s—she’s resting, they’ve had a proper look at her and…” Her voice breaks, and the tear she’d willed away from her eye drops down her face, and it’s like the Hulk punching a hole in a dam. Beatrice Duke isn’t one for sobbing hysterically, but if her cousin’s wheezing-induced emergency room visit doesn’t make the cut, nothing ever will. “She’s gonna be fine.”

 

Ben wraps an arm around her shoulder. Not only is she sobbing hysterically, but she is sobbing hysterically into Benedick Hobbes’s chest.

 

He waits until she’s calmed down a bit, then says. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” He sounds like he really means it, too, which is confusing enough for her to move herself back into her own space and shove her tears away.

 

“What for? You weren’t the one screaming that Hero’s a cheating slut.” For a second she’s there, watching a piss-drunk Claudio shout shit for everyone to hear, Hero getting mad for once in her life and grabbing his shoulders and shouting back. Once Claude left, her breath got more and more ragged until she couldn’t catch it anymore. Now that she knows Hero will be okay, the scene brings anger, not blind panic.

 

“Yeah, but they’re my friends. Well, maybe ‘were’ is more appropriate, unless they come around, and fast.” He closes his eyes, massaging his temples. “I never thought Claude would do that. Or Pedro. Or Leo, for that matter.” He lifts his head up and glances around. “Where is Leo, anyway? He drove here right after you in the ambulance, did he not?”

 

_Leo_. Just the mention of him sends a jolt of anger down her spine. “Once they came out and told us she was okay, he said he needed to get out and go for a drive. He made it sound like he would have rather her died than have to live with the smirch on her honor, or something. Sexist bastard.” She’d said that before about her cousin, but never with such venom. Now she realizes it had never been a joke, not really. “He doesn’t believe his own sister over the captain of his precious football club.”

 

Ben doesn’t argue. In a glance over at him, he almost looks like he agrees. Which is ridiculous, because she and Ben don’t agree on anything. On principle. But he’s not complying with their terms of engagement.

 

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

 

Bea lets out a bitter laugh that tastes like bile. “You can help Claudio off a cliff, maybe.”

 

“That might be a bit drastic. We could go knock some sense into him, if you like. Nothing like physical violence to solve your problems.”

 

His attempts at joking aren’t annoying, they’re actually making her feel the tiniest bit better. She pushes her hair back away from her face, trying not to let the small smile onto her face and failing, because the change is such a relief.

 

He’s quiet for a minute. “So you don’t have a way home?”

 

“I’m staying with Hero.”

 

“Quite right.” _What._ “Have you been in to see her?”

 

“No.” She wraps her arms even tighter around her knees. “They won’t let me. They say she needs rest.”

 

His brow wrinkles in a way that’s not in the least bit adorable. “Then why exactly are you here?”

 

“I need to stay with Hero.”

 

“And where, pray, will you be staying?” She hadn’t thought that far ahead, damn it, but her eyes flick down to the bench, and he raises his eyebrows in response. “Right. Come on, up you get. You’re going home, going to get as best a sleep as you can, then I’ll drive you back in the morning to be here when Hero wakes up.”

 

Stunned, Bea does as she’s told. She grabs his hand and pulls herself up, stretching out her legs that were tensed under her for so long. She lets that take as long as possible before asking, “Why are you being so nice to me?” _Benedick is in love with Beatrice._ The words echo in her head. For the first time, they don’t make her visibly gag.

 

“Because,” he says with an eye-roll, “the both of you just got a lot of shit you don’t deserve, and despite what you may think, I don’t despise you.”

 

_In love with Beatrice._ “You mean you don’t believe any of it?”

 

“Not a word. First of all, it doesn’t fit at all with the Hero I know. Second of all, you don’t believe it, and you know her better than anyone. Third of all, it became very apparent that Claude and Pedro hadn’t even talked to you guys about it to try and figure out what happened, they just believed the worst. And then shouted it. Loudly.” He pauses, then clears his throat. “Anyway, they didn’t conduct themselves in a manner that would give them my vote of confidence, and you two have.”

 

Bea stares at him for a second, quite unable to match this fairly perceptive guy with the dickface whose existence seemed to revolve around antagonizing and being antagonized by her. The asshole who broke her heart when he was fourteen. “Wow, you’ve actually been logical for once in your life.” She doesn’t mean for it to come out as an insult, but that’s what her brain jumps to. Familiar territory with all this weirdness.

 

“Told you I could surprise you.” When he smirks, he’s never looked more attractive. _Now is not the time._

 

He then flings his arm towards the exit. “To the Benmobile!”

 

Bea snorts.

 

“You aren’t telling me you wouldn’t name your car the Beamobile if you had one?”

 

She scoffs. “No, I would of course come up with a _much_ wittier name.”

 

“I’d like to see you try.”

 

“Literally anything is better than the Benmobile. I could name it the Beakeeper and it would be cooler than yours.” She ponders for a moment. “Actually, that’s not half bad.”

 

“You think Beakeeper is better than Benmobile? You’re a loony.” By then they’d reached the car in question.

 

“Whatever, you’re just jealous that I’d be making a pun every time I beep the horn.” She elbows him over the gearshift. “Get it? Beap?” Seriously, what is happening to her? She and Ben are not friends. She shouldn’t be interacting with him as such, no matter how sensitive he’s proved himself to be.

 

“The inanity of your so-called jokes has reached new heights, Beatrice.”

 

“Bitch, I’m fabulous, you just can’t keep up.”

 

He’s about to say something, then thinks the better of it and switches on the radio instead. Bea takes his silence as defeat, but doesn’t have long to revel in her victory. She sighs deeply when they pull up in front of her house.

 

“Shit, Leo’s car is here. I should have figured he’d be back.” She slams her head into her headrest. “I don’t want to deal with any of this right now.” She drags out the word ‘now’ in a pathetic whine, wishing she could just skip the next few days of her life.

 

There’s shuffling of keys from Ben’s side of the car as the engine shuts off. Bea keeps her eyes closed, because maybe then everything will go away. Then she’s being tugged out of the car into Ben’s arms for the second time that night. She surprises herself by finding the hug not entirely unwelcome. (She muses momentarily that she’d probably hug those weird year 9s right now, she’s so desperate for comfort. She’s definitely not trying to justify why she isn’t running as fast as she can in the opposite direction.) But Ben is the perfect height for her head to rest on his shoulder and for his head to be just above hers. And he smells really good.

 

“It’s going to be okay.”

 

Good feeling’s gone. She pulls away. “How can you _possibly_ know that?”

 

“Because Hero is a good person who deserves good people in her life.” He says this with conviction, like there’s no doubt. “That is going to happen, even if I have to personally build a new friend group for her from scratch. We can erase Claudio from her heart because he doesn’t deserve to be there--”

 

She pulls his head down from perfect hug-height to perfect kiss-height. His surprise lasts for less than a second. Her surprise lasts much longer than that, but her tongue is in his mouth and his arms are getting tighter around her back and she’s running a hand through his hair and on her tiptoes and he’s a _good_ kisser.

 

The one thing that registers in her brain is that she doesn’t want to stop, because stopping means talking and talking is confusing. It also means she’ll probably have to acknowledge the light, warm feeling expanding in her stomach to her chest and throat. Not to mention kissing him is a lot better than remembering why she’s so angry and hurt.

 

But eventually Ben pulls away and rests his forehead on hers. Both are breathing extremely hard, which is odd—Bea didn’t notice being out of breath a second ago.

 

“What the bloody hell was that?” There’s no punch behind it, and the smile on his face betrays the fact that he thoroughly enjoyed what just occurred. Plus, he’d been rather enthusiastic about it all.

 

“Maybe… I don’t despise you either.”

 

His smile grows into a grin that lights up his face in the semi-darkness. “I knew it.”

 

“You knew nothing, you idiot boy.” His smile grows even wider and his lips are on hers again. The summer night heats up and she pulls him back until she’s up against the car. Now that she no longer has to support her own weight, the space between them shrinks to nothing. Her hands travel down his chest and under his jacket, and his palm is sliding up her thigh. When she starts fiddling with his shirt buttons, Ben abruptly pulls away.

 

“Let’s take this inside, shall we?”

 

“Bit pretentious, are we?” The words fall out of her mouth before she realizes what he means, and a blush creeps up her neck. Teenagers, making out against a car in broad lamplight. “ _Crap_. Yes. Inside.” Letting go of him doesn’t seem quite right though, so she grabs his wrist and pulls him along after her as she finds the spare key (in all the chaos, she forgot her house keys). It’s only then she realizes how close they are to hand-holding and drops his arm. And suddenly it’s a little awkward.

 

Everything is basically cleaned up. It doesn’t look like anything happened. Bea walks right past the kitchen to the couch, so she won’t have to look at it. She pulls her knees up, aggressively not caring that she’s wearing a short dress that Hero insisted looked amazing on her (it’s not quite her style, but Hero was completely right, as she usually is about those sorts of things).

 

“Bea?”

 

She doesn’t look up. Everything’s coming back and she’s confused and angry, and it’s hard to separate the two.

 

“Please give me some indication that an alien spirit demon didn’t just possess you out there.”

 

He’s pleading with her. Actually. It’s weird. It certainly felt like she’d been possessed, but not by anything outside of herself. Not that that makes any sense at all.

 

“Nope. All me.” She finally looks up at him and he looks broken but hopeful. Something inside her shatters and she decides from then on that this isn’t going to be awkward. So she hits the cushion beside her and says “Sit down, dickface, and stop looking at me like that. I swear there have been kicked puppies who look less pathetic than you.”

 

Hesitantly, he sinks down next to her.

 

“Um,” she pushes back her hair in an effort to gather her thoughts. “This is a really weird time for…” She pauses, then gestures to the two of them. “This. With everything that just happened.”

 

Most of the pathetic look is gone. “What sort of ‘this’ are we talking about?”

 

She lets out an exasperated sigh. Does he really need her to say it out loud? “A Bea-and-Ben-are-together sort of ‘this’?”

 

A smile pricks at the corner of his mouth. “This is the kind of thing I can get behind.” He maybe tries to kiss her again, but she needs to talk the weird away. (Even though talking makes the weird worse. But just kissing him won’t actually solve anything.)

 

“We have the worst timing, though. How are we even going to tell anyone?” She puts on a big, cheesy smile. “Like, ‘Hey Hero, I know your boyfriend is an actual piece of literal shit, but Ben and I got together while you were unconscious!’” The smile drops off her face. “Yeah, no.”

 

“I don’t really think sharing with the world is our top priority.”

 

“Yeah, but we should at least tell Hero.” She slumps down on the couch. “Oh my God, they’re going to gloat so much. That is, if we all ever speak to one another again.”

 

“Quite frankly, I don’t give a dalek’s ass what they say.”

 

Bea glances over at him and giggles. “You’re such a loser.”

 

“You understood the joke, though, which makes you just as much of a loser.” The smile drops from his face as he shifts around so he’s facing her. Slowly, he brushes his fingers down her cheek, trailing them down her neck. The touch, and the look in his eyes, is enough to make her shiver. Like she’s some swooning girl in a teen romance novel. Disgusting.

 

“I like you, Beatrice. A lot. We have a lot of shit between us, but right now all I want to do is kiss you again without talking about anyone else. Okay?”

 

Instead of answering, she wraps her arms around his neck and brings his face to hers.


End file.
